He probably would have asked to go back into prison.

"Frontend developer imprisoned for 10 years for not using the latest framework to center his divs"

"I wouldn't have wasted two more days of my life trying out a new state management library that does exactly the same thing as the rest."

With the state of npm these days you can go on holiday for a month and come back to a new world and find your React structure deprecated

Honestly, front-end development is probably the most forgiving area of all for tech workers returning from an extended hiatus.

Front-end churn is like the apocryphal factoid about the human skin replacing itself completely every few years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that you're never more than 4 years behind the state of the art in front-end development.

I got out of school in 2013 and then went to a job that was pretty self isolated, working in proprietary format that wasn't really aware of the rest of industry - at best there was some Python and some .Net work. I took another position a couple of years ago where I got throw into the deep end of the modern material - ASP.NET Core, Node, NPM, React, Typescript, modern ES, the whole kit and kaboodle. I can tell you it took me a loooonnng time to get it all figured out. A lot has changed in the latter half of this decade.

Do you think for the better? - I don't think so

.Net? Absolutely. Tools? Oh yeah. JavaScript, HTML, and CSS? Probably. The sheer breadth of things you need to know to stay relevant? Not so much - it's just too much.

10 years, or 1 year, wouldn't be much different.